FIELD NOTE

William S. Brown's “SOM: The Formative Years” (1983):
A New History of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Nicholas Adams

As a corporate entity, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is not easy to understand. Founded by brothers-in-law Louis Skidmore (1897–1962) and Nathaniel A. Owings (1903–84), the firm grew quickly, opening its first office in Chicago in 1936, a second in New York in 1937, and a third in San Francisco in 1947. Offices were opened thereafter in Portland, Oregon (1951; closed in 1990), Washington, D.C. (1967), Boston (1971; closed in 1985), Los Angeles (1974), Houston (1976; closed in 1988), Denver (1977; closed in 1987), and London (1986). Today SOM is also represented in China, India, and the Middle East. Although the Chicago office is conventionally considered the firm's home base, each location has its own designers and production specialists and keeps its own records. SOM is big: over the span of eighty years its tens of thousands of employees have built between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand buildings—no one knows the exact total. And SOM has not helped clarify its own story. Owings called the firm “a modern ‘Gothic Builders Guild,’” emphasizing anonymity and collectivity, and although published collections of its most notable buildings (representing a fraction of SOM's total output) appear every few years, these publications never mention either the specific office or the names of the responsible design partners.READ MORE

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Published since 1941, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians is a leading English-language journal on the history of the built environment. Each issue offers four to five scholarly articles on topics from all periods of history and all parts of the world, reviews of recent books, exhibitions, films, and other media, as well as a variety of editorials and opinion pieces designed to place the discipline of architectural history within a larger intellectual context.